Nicolae Ceausescu

Dusan Vranic/Associated Press

Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed with his wife on Christmas day of 1989, was a maverick and despotic Rumanian Communist leader who pursued an independent course abroad and demanded slavish subservience at home.

For one of Eastern Europe's most durable dictators, Mr. Ceausescu's downfall after 24 years of repression at home and bridge-building to the West came astoundingly fast, even when measured against the frantic pace of change in the Soviet bloc that year.

Just a month before his death, tens of thousands of workers marched under fluttering flags to hail President Ceausescu's re-election as the General Secretary of the Communist Party.

But although the carefully orchestrated ceremony did not allow a murmur of dissent, long-simmering national rage over a Draconian economic policy, Ceausescu nepotism (his wife was his Deputy Prime Minister), a bizarre cult of personality and harebrained agricultural and architectural schemes, many experts say, reached a flash point in December of 1989 in violent demonstrations in the western city of Timisoara.

The overthrow ended the rule of a strangely contradictory figure, one who showed one face to the outside world, another to his people.

He welcomed two American Presidents, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, to Bucharest and helped Mr. Nixon plan his opening to China in 1972. He was received, in turn, in Washington and feted by President Jimmy Carter. He was the only Eastern bloc leader to carry on simultaneous diplomatic relations with Israel, Albania and China. He freed Rumanian Jews to emigrate to Israel, although, it later came out, Israel paid millions of dollars in ransom fees.

He also denounced the Soviet military sweep into Afghanistan in 1979, refused to take part in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and other Warsaw Pact maneuvers and barred Soviet bases on Rumanian soil. Cultism, Inefficiency: Invoking Stalin But at home, the taciturn and humorless Mr. Ceausescu created what was often described as his own Stalinist regime, complete with huge, underused building projects and a personality cult that saw his face - and increasingly, his wife's, retouched to make her appear 40 years younger - plastered throughout the country.

Highlights From the Archives

Foreign Desk

The bloodiest of the revolutions in Eastern Europe a decade ago in nine days shoved Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in front of a firing squad. Ten years after a radio announcer exulted, ''The antichrist has been executed on Christmas Day,'' Romanians are still on a national quest to piece together what happened.

Magazine Desk

BY DAVID BINDER; David Binder is assistant news editor in the Washington bureau of The Times.

The first question people ask when they hear that you have just spent an hour with Nicolae Ceausescu is, ''How did he look?'' The implication of the question was whether President Ceausescu has long to live.

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